Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings And The Lost Ocean Review

Here’s a little story all about how I picked up the sequel prequel and discovered that I like it a lot. So Then I found the prequel sequel and ended up having a pretty decent time.

Not very catchy, but you get the idea.

So. Baten Kaitos: EWatLO. Or Baten Kaitos for short. Or BK for extra short. But not that BK. This BK.

Anyway. Baten Kaitos is the first game in the Baten Kaitos series to be released. It was followed up with a prequel called Baten Kaitos Origins. I played Origins first, not knowing it was a prequel, but that’s ok. We’ll talk about that one another time.

BK is one of the rare RPG’s on the GameCube. There’s not a lot of them and I think that’s a shame. But this one makes up for it by being a big game with a very good story in a well fleshed out world, a unique combat system that is easy to use but hard to master, tons of side content, a really good soundtrack and some pretty unintentionally funny voice acting. When you discover that the Monolith/Tri-Ace people worked on it, that comment about the VA won’t be all that surprising. They really did kind of pioneer it but they never perfected it.

So. We are NOT the hero in this story. His name is Kalas. We are his Guardian Spirit, which is a nice little change. It takes us out of the usual silent protagonist role and lets us have a role more like Jiminy Cricket. We aren’t exactly Kalas’ conscious but we do make get to make decisions and depending on the relationship we have with him, battles can go a little differently. More on that later.

We find ourselves in a forest with not a lot of memory, but not total amnesia for a change. We wake up in a doctor’s office in a tiny little agricultural village and get a decent length plot dump of which there are a lot of in this game. Kalas here doesn’t really want to have much to do with other people but eventually we run into people needed some help, so we help.

Turns out the emperor is planning on doing something pretty bad and wants to resurrect an ancient evil God, use it’s powers, and take over the world even more than he really has already. The world, in this instance, is a handful of floating islands. Why are they floating? Because generations ago a group of wizards attempted to defeat the evil God, Malpercio. Well, Mal was too beefy to be deaded so they split his body up into parts and sealed those parts into magnus, buried them, and sent the islands up into the sky so it would be impossible for the parts to ever find their way back together and bring Malpercio back to life. That’s bad news for everyone.

“But Jason!” you scream under your breath. What’s a magnus? Good question, bucko. Magnus is how this world operates… kind of. See, a magnus is a card. Like a tarot card or a playing card kind of thing. It can contain the essence of something. That something can be a weapon, water, food, an idea, a pillow, a shirt, birds, fish… really just about anything. How it works? We don’t know. But it does, and that’s the important thing. So the folks in this world can put all their worldly possessions into magnus and just haul it all around with them. It’s like pokeballs but not for thunder rats, but I do suppose that would also work.

So, Emperor Geldoblame wants the magnus of Malpercio and we, along with a variety of people we meet across the islands on our travels vow to stop him. Like you do.

We visit each island in an attempt to prevent Geldoblame from getting the magnus and, as per usual, it doesn’t always work. Thing go from bad to worse to real bad and then back again to good if we do out job right.

There’s a decent variety of characters that join up with Kalas on this mission. There’s a wizard, a fisherman, a former soldier, another wizard, a former assasin, and even a queen. Fancy stuff. Each character is attached to one of the islands in the world and that has plot purposes later on. It’s not just for the sake of being inclusive.

So without getting into spoilers, the more and farther we go the more it seems like someone on the inside is working with the bad guys. There’s a big confrontation, a big reveal, a lot of emotions, and a lot of mostly bad voice acting to go along with it.

The story is really pretty good and well told, but the voices telling it aren’t the best.

In between all the story stuff there’s a bunch of side quests like finding fragments of constellations to repair a ceiling, and filling in a family tree for a dying man. The rewards are often quite worth it and these quests literally span the entire game so there’s plenty to keep you busy, and a lot of it can be done just doing regular game play if you want to put a little effort into it.

Gameplay is, mostly, basic RPG style stuff. Run around, fight battles Chrono Cross style (meaning they aren’t random, enemies appear on the map and you touch them to engage. Some of them are aggressive, some mostly ignore you), solve delivery puzzles, talk to people, search homes, get money to buy more magnus, level up, and win the game.

You engage in this battles using your battle magnus. These include weapons, armor, spells, items, taunts, and the all important camera. Every character has their own deck that you build for them using a variety of magnus you find and purchase through the game. Everyone has their own weapons. Kalas, for example, uses a sword. Gibari the fisherman uses oars, the wizard casts spells. So you can’t give Kalas the fire spell. He can’t use it. Weapons are character specific. Armor is more “class” specific. No one really has classes in a traditional sense but everyone kind of has a roll to play and you use equipment accordingly. Lightweight, heavy, helmets, shields, etc. There are also magnus that you “attach” to your weapons.

Let’s talk about how a battle progresses before we get into it more. It’s complicated.

Each character deals a number of cards from their deck. You choose which cards to play (up to a set limit based on character level) and in which order. Order matters. If you use two attacking cards and then an attack buff card, your attacks that round won’t get buffed. If you use the buff first your attacks will get the buff till it runs out after X number of uses. Buffs can be elemental or extra damage. More on that later. There are also armor buffs that you can use when being attacked by an enemy. Restoratives don’t run out. Your potion is with you forever, but it’s also a magnus so it’s random in the deck too. You select a party member to use it on and if you have multiple restoratives you can use all of them in that turn, but you cannot select multiple targets in one turn. So no attacking one enemy twice and a second on once. Same with healing. You get one target to do whatever you can to it. Now, that all said, there is equipment in the game that you can equip on your characters. Everyone has a single equipment slot for one item. That item is unique and specific to that character. It could be a ring, a hat, a ribbon, earrings, whatever. They often don’t provide a lot in terms of attribute boosts but more like protection from status ailments. This one on the one hand might boost your attack and defense a little bit but add a ton of fire resistance. This other one might add nothing to your stats but give near total protection from confusion and poison. It really is up to you how to go about this. There’s no super awesome armor to make one person a walking tank.

There are items that can cause status effects like poison and sleep and sometimes they’re really quite useful in this game. Don’t ignore them. You do at your own caution.

There’s a lot of management when your decks start to get bigger. You’ve got to consider elements and all that. Elements come in fire, water, wind, time, light, and dark. The traditional element wheel doesn’t exist here really. Fire and Ice are opposites. Time and wind, ditto. Light and dark sure are. Physical is also an element but not really. But yes.

After you’ve picked your target and select your cards you’ll get a break down of where your damage came from and it’s totals. Yes, totals. There’s math here.

Say you have a generic RPG snake monster that has some water affinity. You target it with water, it’ll do less damage or even heal it. You hit it with fire, it’ll do extra. You hit it with time, wind, light, dark, physical, no change. Kind of a pokemon like thing. No affinity is 1x damage. Weaknesses are 1.5x, strengths are .5x or even -X. Defense works the same way. If you get hit with a fireball, that’s not physical. If you try and block a fireball with something that doesn’t block fire, you’ll take 100% of the damage from fire. If you whip out an ice shield before that fire ball hits you, you’ll reduce the fire damage.

Some enemies are very physical so using equipment that doesn’t defend against physical attacks very well may not work. Same with elements. And another thing to take into consideration is if you mix your elements you can cancel out the damage. Don’t hit something with a fire sword and then an ice dagger. You’ll cancel out a lot of that elemental damage. 50 fire + 34 ice does not equal 84 fire and ice, it equals 16 fire. That’s a big difference.

Your characters generally have elements they prefer over others. Gibari, for example, gets a lot of wind and water and a little time and fire. Magic users get everything but you may not want to give them everything. Because not only does all that stuff above exist in the game, but you have combos and finishers.

After getting in a successful string of hits you may get a finisher card show up in your hand. These always have elements. So imagine you’re a wizard and you have a lot of time based finishers. You probably don’t want a lot of wind in your deck. Plan accordingly is what I’m saying.

I mentioned a camera before. Monsters in this game don’t carry money. Why would they? They don’t have a capitalist society. To earn money in this game you can either sell extra magnus you don’t need – which the shops don’t really want your junk either so they’ll give you next to nothing for it – or you can sell pictures of monsters you take in the wild. People don’t get out much and they want to see all these big bad creepy crawlies. You take some good pictures and you’ll make a small fortune. The more rare the target, the more money it’s worth. The better the photo, the more you’ll get. Even pictures of your party members can earn you a little bit.

It’s a new idea that I really didn’t care for at first but it did add another level of fun and planning to the battles. Like stealing in Final Fantasy 9, you really want to take care of the pictures early so you can focus on the battle… but you have to wait for that camera card to show up in your hand so you can play it. There are multiple camera magnus in the game so you’re not stuck with one person having to take all the pictures, and there are more advanced cameras that can take better pictures that can develop in less time. Trying to sell an underdeveloped photo gets you less cash.

After a battle you’ll earn exp, but you don’t level up in the traditional sense. You bank all this exp and you go visit the cathedral (where that constellation quest I mentioned earlier is). It’s kind of a little space out of the dimension where you can make offers when you’ve reached enough exp to level up. Why is it like that? I don’t know. Is it annoying? Maybe a little, but it’s not terrible.

Leveling up will raise your health and base stats. If you want to increase your deck and hand size you need to raise your class. This is usually only available after a story segment has completed. You’ll find a special item that you can take to the cathedral and turn it in for a class up. That usually means a few more cards in your deck and one more in your hand to pick from in battles.

It sounds complicated, and honestly it is a little bit. Once you get the hang of it though it’s a lot of fun and much more involving that just tapping A to win. I like it a lot. Easy to grasp, hard to master, but very rewarding when you do.

Graphically I think this is, even to date, one of the best looking games I’ve ever played. Character design is great, enemy design is great, backgrounds are gorgeous, portraits are great. There’s no real cut scenes so to speak other than the opening one which is also really good. Everything has this over the top vibe to it like a Jordorwosky vibe and, normally, I’m not into that. It works really well here though. I could spend a lot of time talking about color and layout and designs and all that but honestly you can look at it and see everything all at once. A picture is worth a thousand words as they said.

I will say my one critique with the graphics is the character models are kind of stiff outside of battle. Not like that terrible modern flash animate stiff like Archer, but stiff.

The music in this game is an absolute treat. Big bold and brassy when it needs it, quiet and relaxing when it needs it, tense and energetic in battles. It really runs the gamut better than a lot of other games I know. Not all the tracks are winners but they’re all appropriate for their time and place.

The voice acting, however, is a weak spot for me. It’s Star Ocean level, because it’s the same people. The voice actors are good but I feel like they were poorly directed. Some of the reads are weird, and the over abundance of some of the lines you’ll hear really gets annoying. Example, Light Flare is a spell in the game. You’ll never forget that because every time you use it the caster will say “Light Flare!” and they only have one recorded voice line for it. This is true across nearly every instance when it comes to battle.

Cut scene VA isn’t terrible, but a couple of the actors aren’t really into it and you can tell. Some of them also have this weird doubling effect on their voices which I have never figured out.

The other ding I’ve got to give the game when it comes to audio is another Tri-Ace/Monolith staple and that’s the music is so loud it drowns out the voices most of the time. Which isn’t all that bad because you might not be able to hear the poorer VA because of the loud music.

Overall, folks, I love this game though. At the end of the day I can play it and really enjoy it for it’s strengths and weaknesses. The pros are all super solid and contribute to an excellent game. The cons are annoyances but not game breaking in any way.

It’s a fantastic game. I recommend it. You can now also get it on PC and the Switch in an HD collection with the original Baten Kaitos and the prequel Origins. However the collection does not feature the English voice acting. In this game that’s not terrible, but Origins literally has some of the best VA I’ve heard in a game ever. It’s sad it’s not available in that one.